Wednesday, May 27, 2015

The growth is slowing with about 40% of the world with full internet access at home. Nearly 3/4 of us have access from mobile phones, but only about 3 billion of that 5.2 billion number have smartphones. That's just a bit more than the 2.8 billion users who have full internet access.

and the US Dollar leads the web

11 of the 15 biggest internet companies are American. The other 4 are from China.

and Messaging Platforms are the Killer App.

Government, Healthcare, And Education Are Huge Opportunities

"The Internet has already transformed the consumer and business space, where entrepreneurs can build products that meet their needs or solve pain points. Larger, more regulated spaces that are less accessible or comprehensible to the average entrepreneur have seen less Internet-driven innovation, and are essentially sitting ducks for startups." - Tech Crunch Summary

A word of caution, you are responsible for securing your data

Lost devices, insider breaches, spyware all contribute to security breaches.

Still the workplace moves forward online, and becomes global

Service jobs are replacing goods producing jobs, with cognitive jobs growing the fastest. More people than ever work remotely with flexible hours. Consumers expect instant response, so businesses are open 24 hours. Which reminds me, I've got work to do. It's 9 AM somewhere!

A big part of that effort revolves around giving fans access to statistics and analytics tools that they can use to figure out which players to draft and keep. In the postseason, NFL.com even went so far as to create a separate fantasy game event that involved just the teams that made the playoffs.

Access to these statistics and analytic tools is something large organizations like the NFL need to compete with the powerful data analysis capabilities available to smaller companies today. In addition to the playoff fantasy game mentioned above, there's also a prowbowl api available. So the NFL seems to be running with the API.

First, let's have a closer look at the The Web services available now which are documented here: http://api.fantasy.nfl.com/v1/docs . Then we'll explore some hidden gems available now in the API that access some underlying predictive analytics, straight form the NFL!

Available Data

Any current player statistics are available through the well documented API calls. To write to the API you'll need a key which you request by emailing fantasy.football@nfl.com .

Analytic Tools

Developers and analysts are used to writing their own analytic tools. The API provides data designed just for custom analytics. The Pro Bowl API returns players twitter user ids. Those feeds along with the players/news call can keep users up to date with the latest developments. Potentially that text data can even be mined and analyzed for predictors of next weeks performance. Does Gronk play better after appearing on Conan?

The NFL algorithms were close. If you change the week number to 2 in the url above, you'll see that Husain did scrape up a point the next week.

seasonProjectedPts

Season projected points appears in the /playesrs/stats response as well. It appears to be a placeholder for now. It doesn't change week to week, and it's 0 for any year prior to 2014. It will be interesting to watch this attribute in 2015.

Watch for more updates to the NFL Fantasy Sports API during the offseason, and for some interesting applications build around the new API.